Monthly reports are easy to make look good. Impressions rise, a few keywords move up, a chart points the right way. None of that tells you whether the underlying work happened, and asking your agency directly tends to produce an answer you cannot verify.
These checks take about twenty minutes and require nothing but a browser. We are an agency, so read them with that in mind. They are still the checks we would run.
1. Count your service pages
Open your site and count how many pages exist for the things you sell. If you offer six services and have one page called Services listing all six, you cannot rank for any of them properly. Each service that someone searches for by name needs somewhere of its own to land.
This is the single most common gap we find, and it is not subtle once you look for it.
2. Count your city pages, then read one
Same test for the places you serve. Then read one of them properly. If the page reads like your homepage with a city name swapped in, it is unlikely to be earning anything. Real local pages mention neighborhoods, landmarks, the specifics of working in that area. A template with the town name find-and-replaced is visible to a reader and usually to a search engine.
3. Check your name, address and phone in three places
Your website footer, your Google Business Profile, and any directory listing you can find. They should match exactly, down to the suite number and the way the street is abbreviated. A mismatch on even one of those quietly tells Google it is less sure who you are than it is about a competitor whose listings agree.
If you moved, changed a phone number, or rebranded in the last two years, check this first. It is broken more often than not.
4. Search for yourself, properly
Not your business name. Searching your own name proves nothing, because you will rank for it whatever happens. Search the thing a customer would search: the service plus the city, with no brand attached. Do it in an incognito window, because your own search history flatters you.
Then look at what is above you. If the answers are national directories rather than local competitors, that tells you something different from being beaten by the business down the road, and the work required is different too.
5. Ask an assistant who they would recommend
Open ChatGPT, Gemini or whatever you use, and ask the question a customer would ask, with your city in it. See whether you are named. This is worth doing every couple of months now, and almost nobody is doing it.
If you are not named, the reason is usually that there is nothing quotable on your site: no page that answers a specific question completely enough to be worth citing. That is fixable, and it is a different problem from ranking.
6. Look at the dates on your reviews
Not the count and not the average. The dates. A business with forty reviews all from two years ago looks dormant, and a steady trickle of recent ones does more for local visibility than a large but stale pile.
While you are there, read what the reviews actually say. Reviews that name specific services are worth more than reviews that say great job, because they associate your listing with the words customers search for.
7. Ask what happened to the inquiries
This is the one that separates reporting from marketing. Ask your agency how many inquiries came in last month, how many turned into booked work, and what each one cost. If the answer comes back in impressions, clicks or sessions, the work is not being measured against anything that pays you.
An agency that cannot answer that question is not necessarily doing bad work. But it does mean nobody knows, including them.
If several of these come back badly
It usually means the work is going into reporting rather than into pages. That is a fixable situation and not always the agency's fault, since plenty of retainers are scoped to produce reports. The repair is normally unglamorous: build the pages that should exist, then get the map profile doing what it is supposed to do.
We are based in South Florida and build everything in-house, which means the person doing your local search work is the person you talk to. If you want an outside read on where your inquiries are actually falling out, we will do that for free and tell you honestly if the answer is that your current setup is fine. You can also just look at what we have built and decide from that.